VOLAPUK, the first artificial language (see UNIVERSAL LANGUAGES) to attain any measure of practical success. First published in 1880, it was the work of J. M. Schleyer (b. 1839), a south-German priest. Volapuk is not, like the earliest attempts of the kind, an a priori language, but is based mainly on English, the rest of the vocabulary being made up from Latin and the Romance languages. The borrowed words are reduced to a monosyllabic form and are often altered in a very arbitrary manner. Thus the name Volapuk itself is made up of the two English words, world and speak, the first in the genitive, the three vowels, a, e, i, being used to express the three cases, genitive, dative and accusative respectively; the nominative is expressed by the bare root, and i is added to form the plural. Th